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Topic: Michael Bay Worship Thread (Read 15700 times)

"Explodes" is definitely the wrong word in that video title. At the end of the video I was waiting for him to scream something from backstage. It's more like "quietly melts down without teleprompter." (spoiler)

Agreed, the only reason I posted that is because when I went back to the original link, I couldn't see the video. I kind of feel bad for the guy, and for the fact that his instinct is to blame the type-face.

"Explodes" is definitely the wrong word in that video title. At the end of the video I was waiting for him to scream something from backstage. It's more like "quietly melts down without teleprompter." (spoiler)

Explodes is the wrong word because it's Michael Bay and I assumed there would be an ACTUAL EXPLOSION.

hahaha thats just great. how the hell did he think that was the best way to deal with that situation? he's a celebrity for gods sakes, is he truly so incompetent that he can't improvise in a worst case scenario?

Explodes is the definitely the wrong word for the video, but after a second thought I guess the guy is making a michael bay joke. Instead we just made fun of his poor video naming skills. I think it says more about us than it does about the guy who named the video.

To borrow a phrase from the critic Robert Warshow via Roger Ebert: A man goes to the movies, and the critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man. Sometimes, that man must also be honest enough to admit that he loved Transformers: The Last Knight.

Perhaps loved is too strong a word, but nothing else accurately describes the sound of pure, incredulous joy that escaped my mouth when, after two incessantly clangorous hours of Mark Wahlberg doing battle with world-threatening robots, the piece of animate metal coiled around his swollen bicep magically transformed itself into a giant sword. I don’t say magically lightly, either. This is a movie about giant robots in which Merlin, played by a bearded Stanley Tucci, plays a pivotal role. Remember the classic Simpsons scene where Xena: Warrior Princess’s Lucy Lawless explains to nitpicking fans that any apparent gaps in the fantasy show’s plausibility can be explained by the fact that “A wizard did it”? In Transformers: The Last Knight, an actual wizard did it.

Transformers: The Last Knight is, by the standards of the head and not the heart, an objectively terrible movie. Its plot, concocted by four credited writers and who knows how many other uncredited ones, is both absurdly convoluted and absurdly simplistic: You could spend the equivalent of the movie’s entire 146-minute running explaining what happens, or you could sum it as “Good robots fight bad robots and also King Arthur.” Michael Bay, who has directed all five (!) films in the series, is not just uninterested in but actively hostile to narrative logic, to the point that the Village Voice’s Bilge Ebiri gave up trying to write about the movie in coherent sentences and styled his review as a string of keyboard-smashing gibberish. Great chunks of story are disgorged and then disregarded, and other apparently crucial developments take place off screen or are leaped over entirely. The movie obliterates any sense of conventional storytelling structure; it might have one act, or it might have 14. There was a point somewhere in the middle where I was no longer sure if it was the same day as it had been when I started watching.

But where most of Michael Bay’s movies are merely bad, The Last Knight is spectacularly bad, bad in such a knowing, deliberate way, bad with such steroidal intensity, that it breaks through into a hitherto unknown dimension of badness. Watching it is like stepping into the spacesuit of David Bowman at the end of 2001, except instead of getting spit forth into a white-on-white room at the furthest reaches of space-time, you emerge into a multiplex lobby, knowing that your world can never be the same. It is a movie in which Mark Wahlberg—whose character’s name, we must never forget, is Cade Yeager—trains sentient metallic beings in the shape of tiny dinosaurs to open his fridge and fetch him a beer; in which Cade Yeager adopts a teenage Latina orphaned by the cataclysms of a previous film and they agree to call each other bro; in which Anthony Hopkins plays a dotty English aristocrat who is the sole surviving member of the ancient order of Witwiccans, whose sacred task is to safeguard the knowledge that the Knights of the Round Table were backed up by 12 giant sword-wielding robots—who, by the way, could also combine their bodies into an even more giant three-headed dragon; in which we learn that Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky, whose only appearance in The Last Knight is via a single wild-eyed 8”-by-10”, was a direct descendant of Merlin. It is a movie in which Hopkins’ aristocrat is attended by an even dottier, and also quasi-sociopathic, robot butler named Cogman, who has served Hopkins’ family for generations, and one in which Hopkins warns Wahlberg, who is poking around the artifacts in Hopkins’ cluttered manor, to be careful with one particular gewgaw, because “That’s the watch that killed Hitler.”

A just and true accounting of all of The Last Knight’s absurdities would run for pages. I haven’t even mentioned how the film keeps cutting back to the (supposedly) elite military force known as the TRF, who—despite the fact that they’re present in nearly all of its major battles—never seem to do anything more than get in the way. (One of Bay’s raisons d’être is to provide spank-bank material for the military-industrial complex, but in this case, they’re shooting blanks.) Or how the movie’s female lead, played by Laura Haddock, looks uncannily like Megan Fox, who was fired from the series after comparing Bay to Hitler. (So eerie is the resemblance that we might as well call this Bay’s Vertigo as well as his 2001.) Or—and I’ll stop after this one, I swear—how there are literally dozens of shots in which characters slide down hard surfaces on their hips, even when there’s no apparent reason to do so. There is no circumstance in Transformers: The Last Knight which Mark Wahlberg cannot approach as if he is trying to steal second base.

For years, Bay was the emblem of all that is wrong with American blockbuster cinema. His movies were thuddingly bombastic, casually racist, overtly sexist, and incoherent to the point of idiocy. But with 2013’s Pain & Gain, Bay seemed to turn a corner. He became self-aware, like an artificial intelligence that had finally learned the trick of seeing human. Pain & Gain—the story of three Florida gym rats whose attempt at extortion goes horribly wrong—didn’t just embody the limits of thick-skulled bro-dude philosophy; it was about it, and that made all the difference. It’s not clear that Bay knew exactly what he was doing with Pain & Gain—for one thing, the movie took a troublesome approach to the murderous real-life case that inspired it—but Bay knew he was onto something, and he’s tried to replicate it in the Transformers movies he’s made since. The Last Knight isn’t exactly a comedy, although Bay encourages his actors to treat it like one. It’s too desperate and noisy to let any of its jokes land. Bay’s method is to throw everything at the wall, then pick up the wall and throw it at the audience. A lot of them are not funny, and a few are offensive, but the movie unloads so many gags with such reckless abandon that a few genuinely inspired ones make it over the transom. When Hopkins is delivering his big speech about how Wahlberg et al. need to save the world, Cogman jumps on a nearby pipe organ and begins playing ominous music to set the mood—a bit of tongue-in-cheek mockery you’d sooner expect from a Mel Brooks parody than a $200-million-plus summer blockbuster.

None of this makes Transformers: The Last Knight good, exactly. It’s incredibly wearisome at times, and the more Bay tries to amp up the tension, the less engaging it gets. (The climax, an all-stops-out extravaganza that features Earth nearly colliding with the Transformers’ home planet, is the dullest part of the movie by far.) But to be worthy of love, a movie need not be perfect, only pure, and this is as close to pure trash as it gets.

Michael Bay is some kind of genius—though his ingenuity is smothered in such a stew of convention, a slog of narrative, and a slurry of bad taste that it’s almost undetectable. It is possible to catch glimmers of his talent through the use of super-discerning equipment, known as the eyes, while bypassing the unfortunate obstacle to ecstasy that’s usually posed by thought. His new film, “Transformers: The Last Knight,” which opens tomorrow, feels at times like the longest night—it runs two and a half hours and encompasses a span of plot that ranges from the medieval battlefields to the primordial realms of Pangaea to the cosmic reaches of outer space. Yet, at its intermittent and fleeting best, “Transformers: The Last Knight” offers more to see and more to startle than do many films by auteurs of overt artistic ambition and accomplishment.

The movie has a story, of course. I would spare you most of the details, but it seems only fair for you to sit through it, too. The story risks being as long to recount as it is to endure, though its leaps of logic and of imagination are at least admirable in their crude audacity. The action starts in medieval England, where shattered bodies fly through the air. As elements of design, the bodies seem to affect Bay less than do the flaming arrows, catapulted fireballs, and clods of dirt that he sends hurtling toward the viewer in 3–D sensation. Sir Lancelot and his men are outnumbered and losing—but they’re awaiting the arrival of Merlin, whose magical weaponry will presumably save the day. Why this matters at all will eventually become clear. But first, let’s meet the giant toys again, in a different era: the Transformers are held captive by the American military, and the few surviving free ones are in hiding as scrap metal, after a devastating attack for which they are blamed. One young girl, Izabella (Isabela Moner), an intrepid fourteen-year-old orphan, has faith in their virtue. When Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) comes to the rescue of the Transformers, Izabella follows him and he grudgingly allows her into his family circle.

The problem is that the world is about to end. Not only are there six giant horns emerging from six different parts of the planet and threatening to burst it apart, but the evil Quintessa is flinging a planetoid—a gargantuan bundle of scrap metal, kudzu, tree branches, and random organic crud—at Earth. As the planetoid breaks apart, it’s on course to destroy cities and kill tens of millions, if not the entire human race. Optimus Prime, the Autobot hero, can help, but he has gone missing, and he can’t save the world alone—some extra help is needed. That’s where Merlin comes in—or, rather, where his staff comes in—not his assistants and event planners, but his long magic wand, which has also gone missing. Cade needs to find it, so he teams up with a British professor of art and archeology, Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), who, in the course of her studies, has cast doubt on the very existence of Merlin.Their go-between is a British lord, Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins), an aristocrat of manners and morals, disguising his deep and mystical knowledge in elegant bluster. Sir Edmund inhabits a castle and schools Cade and Vivian in their historically transcendent duties. His lesson adds to the otherwise vapid script one element of gleeful whimsy: he informs the staff-hunting team about the Order of the Witwiccans—a secret society that has endured through the ages and includes basically every notable from Shakespeare and Mozart to Harriet Tubman and Stephen Hawking (and, for that matter, Sam Witwicky, Shia LaBeouf’s character in earlier “Transformers” installments)—which exists solely, believe it or not, to protect Transformers on Earth. Cade and Vivian (no spoilers here) have something to do with it, which is why they’ve got to get hold of Merlin’s staff, conjure the return of Optimus Prime, and—with the help of faith, family, the U.S. Army, and the right brand of action figurines—save the world.

Yet, really, this is all beside the point. When Bay keeps these absurd plot-gears spinning, he’s displaying his skill as a slick, professional entertainer. But then there are the images of motion—I hesitate to say, of things in motion, because it’s not clear how many things there are in the movie, instead of mere digital simulations of things. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that there’s a car chase through London, seen from the level of tires, that could have gone on for an hour, um, tirelessly. What matters is that the defenestrated Cade saves himself by leaping from drone to drone in midair like a frog skipping among lotus pads; that he and Vivian slide along the colossal, polished expanses of sharply tilting age-old fields of metal like luge Olympians. What matters is that, when this heroic duo find themselves thrust out into the void of inner space from a collapsing planet, it has a terrifyingly vast emptiness that Bay doesn’t dare hold for more than an instant lest he become the nightmare-master. What matters is that the enormous thing hurtling toward Earth is composed in a fanatical detail that would repay slow-motion viewing with near-geological patience.

Bay has an authentic sense of the gigantic; beside the playful enormity of his Transformerized universe, the ostensibly heroic dimensions of Ridley Scott’s and Christopher Nolan’s massive visions seem like petulant vanities. Yet his sense of speed works against his sense of scale and of detail. All the best moments in the movie—pure images, devoid of symbol and, for that matter, nearly empty of sense—go by too fast, are held too briefly, are developed too little. Bay’s highest inspirations are those of a virtually experimental filmmaker of pure sensation; the rush of sensation is also a temptation for experimental filmmakers who often don’t keep their own images onscreen very long (cf. Stan Brakhage). The absolute tastelessness of Bay’s images, their stultifying service to platitudes and to merchandise, doesn’t at all diminish their wildly imaginative power. If Steven Spielberg is the filmmaker without an id, Bay is a cinematic id that gets held in check by the tight superego of script and editing—a free spirit that is anchored to Earth by a pile of junk. In finding his career, he may have missed his calling.